Liquid crystal displays (LCDs) have recently enjoyed wide use because of small thickness, light weight, and low power consumption. An LCD includes a liquid crystal cell and a polarizing plate. A polarizing plate is usually composed of protective films and a polarizing film and obtained by stretching a polyvinyl alcohol film dyed with iodine to make a polarizing film and laminating a protective film to both sides of the polarizing film. A transmissive LCD has a polarizing plate on both sides of a liquid crystal cell and may further have one or more optical compensation films. A reflective LCD usually has, in this order, a reflector, a liquid crystal cell, at least one optical compensation film, and a polarizing plate.
An antiglare film having a transparent base film coated with an antiglare layer is widely employed as a surface film of current display devices. Such an antiglare film is generally produced by incorporating organic or inorganic fine particles into an antiglare layer to texture the surface of the antiglare layer. The problem with this type of surface film is that the image appears washed out in a black display state due to reflected light, which can ruin the display qualities in terms of black levels or depth of blacks.
In order to obtain a display with desired color depth of black, i.e., high black level performance even in bright lightening, it is desirable to make the texture of the antiglare film gentler and smoother. However, it has been difficult to control the surface profile of the antiglare film of the type discussed.
To obtain a smoother surface texture, it has been proposed to dispose a layer with surface roughness on a base film and an additional layer thereon to provide a controlled surface profile as disclosed in WO 2006/88202. JP 2003-25504A discloses an antireflective film having a base with surface roughness, an active ray-cured resin layer with a controlled arithmetic average surface roughness Ra, and an antireflective layer in that order. The film is described as providing good display visibility by the control of the Ra of the active ray-cured resin layer.